Trump saddled GOP with midterms crisis by ignoring an obvious problem

The Republican Party's potential midterms wipeout just got a whole lot worse, and according to a new analysis from MS NOW, it is all because of an inevitable consequence that President Donald Trump was unable to foresee.

On Tuesday night, voters in Virginia approved the state legislature's new congressional district map, which had been gerrymandered in such a way to create four new Democratic majority districts, meaning potentially four new Democratic seats in the House. The change is also not expected to face a genuine threat from any potential Supreme Court challenges. The measure, like a similar one passed by California voters earlier in the year, was done to counteract similar gerrymanders in Texas and other red states that favored Republicans, all of which were done at Trump's demand.

In the wake of the result, Steve Benen, a longtime MS NOW contributor and producer for host Rachel Maddow, wrote that Trump and the Republicans "seemed quite pleased with themselves" after the Texas map was passed, giving them a buffer against voter backlash in the midterms and helping them cling to their narrow majority. However, there was one obvious response to this that they "neglected to appreciate."

"Democrats weren’t just going to sit back, capitulate and grumble about how frustratingly impressive the GOP’s hardball tactics are," Benen wrote. "On the contrary, Democrats had the capacity to fight back — and they did."

He continued: "After the president and Texas Republicans effectively launched a partisan arms race, California Democrats approved a comparable plan to give their party five more seats of their own. GOP officials, again at Trump’s behest, added a handful of additional seats to their gerrymandering tally in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, while Democrats in Utah gained an advantage in Utah after a failed Republican gambit."

The end result of this "partisan arms race" that "Trump and his allies apparently didn’t see coming" is unlikely, for now, to end up benefiting either side, as the changes across the various states currently appear to have zeroed out. This still leaves the GOP in a terrifying position, as voter backlash to Trump's presidency has signaled a major blue wave even without gerrymandered maps.

Benen further cited a post about the results from political scientist Jacob Levy, who honed in on the recurring issue for the GOP, that Trump is unable to fathom his targets fighting back.

"The midterm gerrymandering war and the Iran war alike show Trump’s inability to imagine that the people he’s picking fights with have any agency, any ability to respond," Levy wrote.

"Ideally, the president would now know better, but given that he’s slow to learn lessons, it’s tough to be optimistic," Benen concluded.